Chelsea Follett
This week, viewers will get another chance to submerge
themselves in the dystopian future created by Margaret Atwood.
The Handmaid’s Tale, based on the novel about the
government forcing women to bear children to counter a declining
population, resonated with audiences across the world.
However, the reverse Handmaid’s Tale — the idea
of coercing people to have fewer children — ought to generate
just as much outrage. Particularly when that coercion is justified
by baseless fears.
Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich plays on those fears.
His apocalyptic warnings, which started almost 50
years ago, persist despite decades of evidence proving them wrong.
Just recently, Ehrlich said the collapse of civilization is a “near
certainty” within decades.
“Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest
cataclysm in the history of man have already been born,” he warned in
1969.
Then he said, “Sometime in the next 15 years, the end will
come. And by ‘the end’ I mean an utter breakdown of the
capacity of the planet to support humanity.”
Don’t believe alarmists
saying human population has grown too large, they’ve been wrong for
50 years.
Unfortunately, many people still believe him.
His 1968 best-seller The Population Bomb incited global
panic with claims that out-of-control population growth would
deplete resources, bringing about widespread starvation.
Ehrlich’s jeremiad led to human rights abuses around the
world, [...]
Ryan Bourne
News over the weekend that Theresa May might be considering a
customs union with the EU post-Brexit was baffling to life-long
Eurosceptics.
For years before the referendum, would-be Brexiteers painted two
economic pictures of life outside the EU.
The first was a Thatcherite Britain — one seeking to
reverse swathes of EU regulation and immigration law, cut tariffs,
and pursue global free trade.
The second was merely “political independence”,
leaving the EU’s governance structures, but remaining within
the Single Market.
The customs union has
become a political, rather than economic, fault line - and one
skillfully exploited by the EU and unreconciled
Remainers.
Yes, these two visions contradicted sharply, but neither
considered it desirable to remain within a formal customs
union.
The costs in terms of lost control were too high. Customs union
membership prevents not just independent free trade agreements, but
other commercial partnerships, independent tariff setting, and
regaining our WTO seat, which is why there was such outrage at the
prospect that such a model might still be up for consideration.
Since the latest rumours surfaced, Number 10 has come out and
reiterated its commitment to leaving the customs union. But the
question remains: why is this issue even being debated?
For all the hand-waving by vested interests, it’s
certainly not for economic reasons. Look at Switzerland, a country
outside the customs union that manages [...]
William J. Luther
On the evening of November 2016, Indian Prime Minister Narendra
Modi announced that 500-rupee notes (valued at about $8) and
1,000-rupee notes would become “worthless pieces of paper” at
midnight, no longer recognized as legal tender. The stated goal of
his demonetization plan: to catch criminals. The government offered
a brief window in which old notes could be swapped for new ones,
with the idea that everyone from human traffickers to tax cheats
would have to show up at banks with vast sums of money and confess
their sins or lose the value of their cash holdings altogether.
The costs of this scheme were large. At the time of the
announcement, demonetized notes accounted for 86 percent of all
currency in circulation. As George Mason economist Lawrence H.
White has written, “A serious currency shortage immediately arose,
with predictable consequences. Honest wage laborers in the huge
cash economy went unpaid, honest construction projects came to a
standstill, honest shopkeepers saw sales dry up, and honest
businesses failed. Honest people wasted billions of hours waiting
in queues to exchange old notes for the trickle of new notes.”
Growth in the country’s gross domestic product fell from an
annualized rate of 7.37 percent in the quarter prior to the
announcement to an average annualized rate of 6.06 percent in the
first [...]
Eric Gomez
The diplomatic events of the decade are rapidly approaching.
Later this week, President Moon Jae-in of South Korea will meet
with Kim Jong-un at Panmunjom for the first inter-Korean summit
since 2007. Shortly thereafter Kim will have a
summit with President Donald Trump—the first such meeting
between the sitting leaders of North Korea and the United
States.
A steady stream of news and speculation has preceded the
summits. Over the course of three days last week, Trump revealed
that CIA director Mike Pompeo made a secret
visit to North Korea around Easter to speak with Kim about the
upcoming U.S. summit, South Korea announced that it is working to
negotiate a peace treaty to officially end the Korean
War, and Moon suggested that Kim would not demand the removal of U.S. troops from South Korea in
return for denuclearization. For analysts and lay observers alike
these developments raise some big questions that need to be
answered in the two upcoming summits.
What Is Kim Jong-un Prepared to Give Up?
The most important issue up for discussion at the two summits is
the denuclearization of North Korea. Kim indicated a general
willingness to discuss denuclearization in talks with South Korean officials after the
Pyeongchang Winter Olympics, but he has not provided many details
about what denuclearization means for the North in
the context [...]
Christopher A. Preble
The news that Mike Pompeo, the C.I.A. director, met in secret
with North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, over the Easter weekend has
renewed hope that one of the world’s most dangerous standoffs might
be resolved without war. On Saturday, in fact, Mr. Kim announced
that he would halt nuclear tests. Mr. Pompeo’s trip was surprising
for many reasons: he went personally, it was kept a secret and it
was revealed at a time when others were questioning his fitness to
become secretary of state.
But it says something about America’s place in world affairs
that at least one aspect of the trip was no surprise at all: that
Americans are deeply, centrally involved in a dispute involving two
sovereign countries thousands of miles away from Washington.
Of course, there’s a good historical reason. Under American
tutelage, South Korea eventually evolved from a desperately poor
autocracy to one of the wealthiest democracies on the planet.
American taxpayers continue to spend billions of dollars a year to
help maintain regional security. A similar process played out in
other parts of Asia and in Europe, where the American security
umbrella, including tens of thousands of military personnel,
provided room for those countries’ leaders to build strong
democracies and economies.
American leaders argued that such policies served the cause of
global peace and security. [...]
Ryan Bourne
It slipped under the radar, but the UK has almost hit Tony
Blair’s 1999 university pledge. The higher education
participation rate (an estimate of those who would have gone to
university by age 30) was 49pc in 2016, a whisker from
Blair’s 50pc aim. In 1993, just 13pc of those in their late
20s had degrees.
Conventional educational wisdom heralds this trend as a boon for
Britain. An army of skilled graduates will surely be utilised in
highly productive jobs, propelling economic growth for the future.
Emboldened, education expert Nick Hillman last year proposed
targeting a 70pc participation rate by 2035.
For George Mason University economics professor Bryan Caplan,
this trend wouldn’t elicit celebration. In a provocative new
book, The Case Against Education, he suggests that
university, while individually profitable, is largely a waste of
time and resources from a societal perspective.
In a provocative new
book, Bryan Caplan suggests that university, while individually
profitable, is largely a waste of time and resources from a
societal perspective.
His story is straightforward. There is a significant graduate
earnings premium. Across the OECD, adults with a tertiary degree
earn on average 56pc more than those who merely finish secondary
education. In the US, on which his book is focused, it’s
73pc. A 2016 Institute for Fiscal Studies report on the UK found
graduates in their late [...]
David Bier
President Trump’s “travel ban,” which the
Supreme Court will review next week, seeks to limit immigration
from certain countries because, as the president contends, our
vetting of immigrants has not been “extreme” enough to
keep radicalized offenders out of the United States. Despite this
assumption, Trump required a report to determine whether his
claim was actually true. In the nearly 15 months since then, his
administration has failed to complete its report, stating this past January that it lacks the
relevant information.
In light of this failure, I independently completed the study that Trump
asked for. Its conclusions undermine his claims.
Vetting failures are extremely rare and becoming rarer.
Moreover, after vetting improvements were implemented following the
terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, only one vetting failure
resulted in a deadly attack, causing just 9 percent of terrorism
deaths since the attacks. U.S.-born Americans killed 82 percent of
the terrorism victims since 9/11.
The precipitous decline
in vetting failures after 9/11 proves the government can keep
Americans safe without banning certain nationalities or categories
of immigrants.
I defined “vetting failure” as broadly as possible
to include any foreigner who harbors terrorist associations or
sympathies before receiving permission to enter the United States,
who goes on to commit a terrorism crime. I excluded offenders born
in the United States, those who entered illegally, those extradited
to [...]
David A. Hyman and Charles Silver
If you’re like us, your health insurance coverage includes a
prescription drug benefit. The benefit isn’t free, but you’re
willing to pay for it because it saves you money every time you
have a prescription filled. You are responsible for your co-pay,
and your insurer pays the rest.
At least, that’s how it is supposed to work. But the truth is
that your insurer often pays nothing. Your co-pay is all the
pharmacy receives. Not only that, but your co-pay often exceeds the
amount that someone without insurance would have paid for the drug.
That’s right: People who don’t have insurance are paying
less than you are for the same drug.
In 2017, Texas passed legislation banning this practice for
health insurance contracts issued or renewed after January 1,
2018. Presumably, the legislature acted because lots of Texans
were overpaying for drugs. How many? Until recently, no one really
knew.
The scam works by taking
advantage of consumers’ naive belief that their insurers are
watching out for them.
But researchers at USC’s Schaeffer Center for Health
Policy & Economics just filled in these blanks, and the
numbers are big. They found that overpayments occurred on 23
percent of all prescription drug sales. The overpayment rate for
generic drugs (28 percent) was substantially higher. And for the
twenty most popular [...]
Patrick G. Eddington
The Lone Star state has a rich history and cultural heritage,
with many firsts to its credit. But there’s one not-so-glorious
distinction bestowed upon this state by the federal government:
Texas has more internal Customs and Border Protection checkpoints
than any other state in the Union.
A new Cato Institute project, Checkpoint: America, provides the maps and
related information to prove it. What it also provides are accounts
of the naked brutality and disregard for constitutional rights that
are also a feature of these checkpoints.
The case of Greg Rosenberg is a prime example. Rosenberg
immigrated to the United States from Armenia during the first
decade of the 21st century. Rosenberg grew up in what was then
Soviet-occupied Armenia. Internal checkpoints were a key means of
repression and control, just one of the many things Greg thought
he’d left behind when he came to America and started his life here
as a long-haul truck driver.
As chronicled by ReasonTV, Greg found out the hard way that
Customs and Border Protection agents could be just as abusive as
their former Soviet counterparts.
In late September 2014, Rosenberg found himself on Interstate 35
near Laredo. Like every other motorist, he was forced to pull over
at the local Customs and Border Protection checkpoint. Rosenberg’s
complexion, and his accented English immediately drew the [...]
Daniel J. Ikenson
Donald Trump was not the first U.S. presidential candidate to
blame foreigners and their trade practices for America’s real
and imagined economic woes. That is a time-honored tradition of
U.S. electoral politics. But Trump is the first president —
at least since Congress began delegating parts of its trade
policymaking authority to the executive branch a century ago
— to actually believe that protectionism will make America
great. That alone makes trade war likely. Add a heaping sense of
nationalist grievance and trade war appears imminent.
Behind President Trump’s faith in protectionism is a
stubborn belief that trade is not a cooperative, mutually
beneficial activity conducted between consenting parties, but a
zero-sum game with distinct winners and losers. He perceives U.S.
trade deficits as proof that we are losing at trade and we are
losing because the foreigners cheat. That perspective departs
significantly from the underlying premise of U.S. policy spanning
84 years and 13 presidencies — that trade is a win-win
proposition.
After a year in office during which the president’s trade
policy actions were far less strident than the tone of his
rhetoric, the second year began with the president announcing
tariffs on solar panel components and tariff rate quotas on washing
machines under Section 201 of the Trade Act of 1974 (the
“Safeguards” law). Although the economic rationale [...]
"A preventive war, to my mind, is an impossibility today. How could you have one if one of its features would be several cities lying in ruins, several cities where many, many thousands of people would be dead and injured and mangled, the transportation systems destroyed, sanitation implements and systems all gone? That isn't preventive war; that is war.I don't believe there is such a thing; and, frankly, I wouldn't even listen to anyone seriously that came in and talked about such a thing.... It seems to me that when, by definition, a term is just ridiculous in itself, there is no use in going any further.There are all sorts of reasons, moral and political and everything else, against this theory, but it is so completely unthinkable in today's conditions that I thought it is no use to go any further."-Dwight D. Eisenhower News Conference of (11 August 1954)
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